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The New York City Fire De- partment has no formal designation for a blaze that requires more than five alarms, but on September 11th there were five for the north tower and another five for the south tower, and still the alarms continued to ring, first in firehouses in Chelsea and Chinatown, and then in Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg, and then all across the city, so that in less than thirty minutes more than a hundred companies had been called out. Ladder 24 was called from midtown, and Engine 214 from Bedford-Stuyvesant, and so was Squad 288 from Maspeth, Qyeens, and Ladder 105 from downtown Brook- lyn. Even after the two towers collapsed and tens of thousands of people came streaming out of lower Manhattan cov- ered with ash, the firemen kept coming. That afternoon, Liz Feehan and her sister Tara waited for news together at Taràs house, in Belle Harbor, Qyeens. Three of the men in their family were firefighters, and all three were at the World Trade Center that day: Liz and Taràs father, William, the department's first deputy commissioner; their youn- ger brother John; and Taràs husband, Brian Davan. When the phone rang, Tara picked it up and started yelling. Liz immediately concluded that the call was about one of the two younger men. Their father, the second -ranking official in the ED.N.Y., was, she assumed, too far up the hierarchy to die in the line of dutJ William Michael Feehan had joined the ED.N.Y. in 1959, and during the next forty-two years held every possi- ble rank in a department that was thick with them, from "proby" to lieutenant to battalion chief to commissioner-some- thing only two or three other people have done in the department's histof)T. Fee- han helped fight some of the worst fires in New York, including the Brooklyn Navy Yard fire, in 1960, which killed fifty people, and the Madison Square blaze, in 1966, which killed twelve. For his long, distinguished career, he was venerated by his fellow-firefighters, and also some- times teased by them. "Billy;" his :&íends used to say, "when you joined the de- partment what were they. feeding the horses?" At the time of his death,.F eehan was seventy-one years old, six years past the mandatory retirement age for fire- fighters in the city; and for nearly a de- cade he had held what is technically a civilian post. Still, he kept handy a hel- met and a rubberized suit-known as "turnout gear"--and was fit, and willing, enough to help lay hose. Before Feehan died, few outside the department or the insular world of city government had heard of him. He did not court publici and he rarely attended the functions that high-ranking city of- ficials are invited to. (A favorite eXcuse of his was that he had tried to stop by but couldn't find a parking space.) As first deputy commissioner, Feehan served under three different commissioners and two different mayors, a tenure that testi- fied at once to his ab ty and to his equa- nimitJ "He would quietly suggest to you to do something differently, and you always knew that it was good advice, and you always took it," the current com- miss oner, Thomas Von Essen, told me. Even after Feehan became deputy com- missioner, his men continued to address him as "Chie " a lower but, to them, more honorable title. F eehan began his career with Lad- der 3, on East Thirteenth Stree"tin Greenwich Village. One week after the disaster, I wen down to the firehouse, a squat brick building constructed under Mayor Jimmy Walker, in 1929. The men in the company refer to it as Ladder 3 Recon, for "reconnaissance," and they